Group call is a widely used feature in current communication technologies, such as Push To Talk (“PTT”) and Push To Experience (“PTX”), that enables an originator to establish a communication session with multiple participants. Certain group calls may require that a set of preconditions be met in order for the group call to proceed, such as a minimum quorum of overall participants, a minimum number of certain types of participants, or specific participants that are required. For example, there may be a situation where at least 90% of group members must participate in a group call for it to proceed. Alternatively, in a business setting there may be a situation requiring that at least one company lawyer, marketer, and accountant participate in the group call in order for the group call to proceed. In another example, there may be a requirement that the Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”) participate in the group call in order for it to go forward. Therefore, in the event that the CEO is unable to participate in the group call, the group call cannot take place. Thus, the CEO is said to be a “required” participant in the group call.
The overall group call proceeds only if the set of preconditions are met. In current systems, all of the target devices alert the target users (e.g., by beeping, vibrating, or displaying an icon) immediately when a group call initiation or invite is received. This, however, can be very annoying for the target users because there is no guarantee at the time of the alert that the group call will be able to go forward. For example, a required participant may reject the group call initiation while others accept, and those who accept are left waiting for a call that fails to proceed, leading to a poor end user experience.
In a number of different scenarios, the targets for a group call, according to current systems, will alert users despite a high likelihood of the group call not proceeding. For example, there is a high likelihood of this happening if there is a minimum quorum of participants necessary or specific participants that are required.
Lack of assurance that a group call will proceed is especially problematic for users of cell phones or other electronic communication devices that are powered by batteries. More specifically, sending an initiation for a group call to participants using battery-powered mobile stations, for example, can result in a waste of battery power while the mobile station waits for the call to proceed even though there is no guarantee that the group call will proceed. Moreover, some of the wireless system's capacity is utilized even before it is known whether the group call will be able to proceed.
This can be annoying for users of target mobile stations that are waiting for other targets to answer, especially while waiting for manual answer targets or targets whose presence is set to “unavailable,” as they can sometimes take a long time to accept a group call initiation, if at all. This is also distracting for users of target mobile stations who reacted to a beep, chirp, or even an initial talk burst audio, only to discover that the group call will not occur either because a quorum cannot be established or one or more required targets do not accept the group call initiations.
The problem is further amplified when the targets include a mixture of automatic and manual answer mode targets, or in the event that some manual answer mode targets take a longer time to answer than other manual answer mode targets. System operators are typically sensitive to capacity and/or targets are sensitive to battery life or having their user's time wasted waiting for a group call that is either delayed or does not occur.
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